The Ugly Renaissance (17 page)

But in the squalid and overcrowded residential areas of the city, there were a multitude of maladies that carried off hundreds every year. The streets themselves were occasionally host to disfigured
lepers who wandered
into the city in defiance of the long-standing prohibition on their entering the gates, and who rang bells to warn passersby of their presence. The home was, however, the principal site of illness. In winter, damp, cold houses were the ideal environment for bronchitis, pneumonia, and influenza. Infants and the elderly were especially vulnerable and died in droves. In the hot, sticky summers, dysentery—nurtured by the inadequacy of the water supply—was rampant, while diarrhea—caused by food that had gone off in the heat—regularly proved deadly to children.

Typhus—which was described by
Girolamo Fracastoro in his treatise
De contagione
(1546)—was a constant threat. Possessing only a few sets of clothes and unable to keep houses properly clean, the Florentine poor were continually plagued by lice, and thus had no defense against typhus. When an epidemic struck—as it regularly did—it would spread from house to house, and from family to family, with breathtaking speed. In the pressure-cooker environment of the
Stinche, typhus could wipe out hundreds in the blink of an eye. Michelangelo’s work on the
David
only just predates the worst outbreak of typhus in Italy, which extended from roughly 1505 to 1530.

In a similar vein,
malaria was a depressingly regular feature of life, especially in areas like Florence and Ferrara that were surrounded by marshes and lakes which provided the ideal home for the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Especially in summer, it would hit the city with a vengeance. Often laboring in the fresh air and with little understanding of how the disease was communicated, working men and women regularly fell victim. It could occasionally prove fatal. As
Alessandra Strozzi recorded in her correspondence, her son Matteo had died less than a month after contracting the disease. More often, it was merely painful, unpleasant, and incapacitating.
One of its more prominent sufferers was
Benvenuto Cellini, who may well have first contracted the illness in his youth in Pisa but who attributed the sickness to “unhealthy air.”
Subsequent attacks left him “raving” in his delirium so severely that he inadvertently offended the duke of Mantua.
Finding himself unable to work, he began to fear for his life.

Shortly before Michelangelo returned to Florence to begin work on the
David
, however, a new disease had arrived in Europe that was less susceptible to becoming an epidemic but was no less serious. Making its first appearance in Europe in the 1490s, courtesy of Columbus and
those who had followed him to the Americas, syphilis rapidly took hold. It perplexed doctors seeking to diagnose Michelangelo’s patron Alfonso d’Este in 1497 and claimed the life of no less a figure than Francesco II Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua (1466–1519), who began an affair with
Lucrezia Borgia in 1503. The disease caused panic, not only because of its unfamiliarity, but also because of its appalling effects. As the Veronese doctor
Girolamo Fracastoro observed,

In the majority of cases, small ulcers begin to appear on the sexual organs … Next, the skin broke out with encrusted pustules … and they soon grew little by little until they were the size of the cup of an acorn … Next these ulcerated pustules ate away the skin … and they sometimes infected not only the fleshy parts but even the very bones. In cases where the malady was firmly established in the upper parts of the body, the patients suffered from pernicious catarrh which eroded the palate or the uvula or the pharynx or tonsils. In some cases the lips or eyes were eaten away, or in others the whole of the sexual organs … Besides all of the above symptoms, as if they were not bad enough, violent pains attacked the muscles [which were] persistent, tormented the sufferer chiefly at night, and were the most cruel of all the symptoms.

The sudden appearance and mysterious etiology of syphilis baffled and terrified the Florentine public, and it seemed that the contagion could only be explained as a punishment from God. But the truth was less complex. Transmitted principally through sexual contact, syphilis found its ideal home in the overcrowded houses of the Renaissance city, where brothels did swift business and people lived (quite literally) on top of one another. While it was liable to strike at random, it was a grim inevitability that it became endemic in Florence’s poorer quarters.

But by far the worst disease in Renaissance Florence was the
bubonic plague. From its first appearance in 1348, plague epidemics were a regular and terrible feature of Florentine life. Carried by fleas jumping from rats to humans, the disease found a perfect breeding ground in the filth of the city’s unpaved streets and chaotic roads. In the absence of any useful medication, and in the cramped, unhygienic conditions in residential areas, infection spread quickly and with often devastating
effects.
Historians estimate that 30 percent of the Florentine population died in the
Black Death (1348–50), and subsequent outbreaks regularly claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Although the epidemics of 1374 and 1383 appear not to have been quite so severe,
the outbreak of 1400, for example, claimed the lives of more than 12,000 individuals and carried off 5,005 people in July alone.

Michelangelo and the artists of the Renaissance were acutely conscious of the risk. Only four years after he completed the
David
, for example, plague broke out with particular venom in
Bologna, and letters flew back and forth between Michelangelo and his friends there.
Giorgione fell victim to the pestilence in 1510 during his dalliance with a “certain lady” who had unknowingly contracted the malady. Michelangelo’s own brother Buonarroto would fall victim to the plague in October 1528. The disease brought terror.
After sleeping with the adolescent maid of the Bolognese prostitute Faustina, Cellini fell ill with a sickness with similar symptoms and was petrified that he might have come down with plague. Death lurked around every corner, or, in some cases, in every bed.

S
EX AND
D
ESIRE

Despite the continual threat of sickness, the domestic world of the Renaissance was permeated by
sex, and as the incidence of syphilis suggests, it would be no exaggeration to say that—religious sentiments and moral prejudices notwithstanding—the home was the workplace of desire. Even if Michelangelo himself appears to have had little appetite for sex (male or female) at this stage in his life, he was quite literally surrounded by it, and it could not but have influenced his outlook on existence.

Premarital Sex

However much ecclesiastical moralists like San Bernardin
o of Siena might have wished otherwise, sex was most definitely not restricted to the marital bond, and Michelangelo’s social circles would have been suffused with premarital liaisons.

Although forbidden, it was almost expected that unmarried men
would indulge in a little light fornication. Typical of the attitude of the period in this regard was the behavior of a number of Michelangelo’s contemporaries and near contemporaries.
Never one to contemplate marriage,
Raphael, for example, conducted an endless stream of love affairs “with no sense of moderation” whatsoever. Even worse was Fra
Filippo Lippi. Despite being in holy orders, Lippi was reported to be “
so lustful that he would give anything to enjoy a woman he wanted if he thought he could have his way.” As Vasari reported,

His lust was so violent that when it took hold of him, he could never concentrate on his work. And because of this, one time or another when he was doing something for Cosimo de’ Medici in Cosimo’s house, Cosimo had him locked in so that he wouldn’t wander away and waste time. After he had been confined for a few days, Fra Filippo’s amorous or rather his animal desires drove him one night to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bedsheets and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasures for days on end.

The same was no less true of girls, whose amorous adventures were just as pronounced.
So rampant was the sexual experimentation of young females that in 1428 a law was promulgated in
Belluno which stated that no woman over twenty could be assumed to be a virgin unless there was conclusive proof of her purity.

This sort of behavior might have been innocent enough, but it also had a more nefarious dimension. Mostly committed by men—or groups of men—outside wedlock,
rape was a distressingly common feature of everyday life. There are, for example, endless accounts of humble women being hijacked in alleyways or on country roads by sexually predatory men, and it was partly to cater to the legions of abandoned illegitimate children born of rape that the Ospedale degli Innocenti had been founded. Far more terrifying was the high incidence of sexual predation against female children. Between 1495 and 1515, “
over one-third of the forty-nine documented victims of convicted rapists were girls between the ages of six and twelve, and at least half were aged fourteen or under; numerous others were seduced without force or were sodomized.”

Marriage

Yet the paradigmatic setting for sex was, of course, the marriage bed. Although some rather extreme male writers, such as Gianmario Filelfo,
advocated celibacy even within wedlock, procreation was generally considered to be the principal function of all women, and the production of children was perceived as the object of marriage. It was thus quite natural that sex should have been the central feature of married life. But while women—though bound by the “conjugal debt”—were supposed to refuse “illicit” sexual acts that aimed at pleasure rather than procreation, it is clear that married couples commonly enjoyed active and exciting sex lives. Even in his old age, Pontano was able to pen a verse to his wife, Ariane, which spoke to their healthy sexual relationship in their declining years:

Wife, your elderly husband’s delight,

Love and trust of our chaste bed,

You who keep my old age fresh,

Who set an old man’s cares to flight,

And help me triumph over old age,

A grey head singing of youthful passion;

But, as if fires of youth return

And you were at once first love and new,

First passion, headlong rush,

I want to fan those ancient flames.

Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, was of the same cast of mind. After marrying for the second time, in May 1485, he gladly threw himself back into the universe of marital sex.

Within this context, contemporary religious teaching dictated that men were always supposed to be on top and that sex be restrained to the most basic activities.
Oral sex was definitely taboo, and by the latter part of the fifteenth century heterosexual
sodomy in particular was placed high on the list of carnal offenses. But as we might expect, the realities were quite different. Although the immediate context for his comments was somewhat removed from marriage,
Beccadelli’s views on this subject might be taken as broadly representative of the practices of marital sex during the Renaissance.
Not only was he a cautious
enthusiast of women being on top, but he also spoke highly of sexual variety. “
Why,” the character Lepidinus asked Beccadelli, “is a man never able to give it up once he’s fucked someone in the arse or mouth?” Whether Michelangelo agreed or not is open to speculation, but many of his friends would have asked themselves a similar question with a knowing smile.

The extent to which married couples indulged in such conjugal jollity presents us with a rather striking point. The nature of ordinary domestic life—even in “middle-class” houses—was not exactly oriented toward privacy. Small and cramped, with multiple generations under the same roof and many people sharing a room, Renaissance houses did not leave much space for discretion. Whatever happened between a husband and a wife would almost certainly have been heard—if not seen—by a host of other people, from children and servants to apprentices and lodgers. While shame was thus an integral part of the theory of wifely modesty, there could have been little shame about the sexual act in daily life at home.

Extramarital Sex

Marriage did not, however, mean fidelity. Infidelity among married men was so prevalent as to be almost a fact of life.
Even a devoted husband like Pontano was painfully conscious that marriage could become something of a bore and that the sexual appeal of a long-beloved wife could wane. Men habitually looked elsewhere for amusement. Francesco II Gonzaga’s affair with
Lucrezia Borgia, and
Giuliano de’ Medici’s lustful attitude toward
Simonetta Vespucci, were characteristic of the contorted sexual lives of socioeconomic elites, but there were also a host of other configurations. Female servants and slaves were particularly common targets of married men’s desires. A few years after the
David
was completed, Michelangelo’s brother Buonarroto only acquiesced in his wife’s request for a young female servant on the grounds that “
a man can use a young woman to serve him in bed better than the old ones” and evidently expected his wife to put up with this blatant—but fairly common—act of domestic adultery.

Married women, too, were thought to have a “
powerful yearning for semen,” and the lure of extramarital sex was all but irresistible. The sexual appetites of women—and especially married women—were almost
proverbial, and many male writers despaired of a wife’s capacity for fidelity. As
Domenico Sabino wrote in his dialogue
On the Conveniences and Inconveniences of Wives
(1474), “
It is much easier to defend an unfortified citadel on a low plain than to keep a wife free from shameless lust”; in fact, it was, he lamented, “almost impossible to protect what everybody desires.” So common was female adultery that
Cristoforo Landino felt able publicly to mock his friend Bindo “the one-eyed” for being cuckolded: